


give me your heart, call it a pretty story, and I'll wash the blood from your hands

by kwritten



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Character Study, Charloe endgame, Comics compliant, Dark!Charlie, Discussion of Incest Themes, F/M, Faux Historical Documents, Historical Metaphors, Literary Analysis, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, POV Female Character, Post-Series, Religion as a Literary Process, Threesome - F/M/M, Uncle/Niece Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-23 23:21:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4896208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt #47; "They are Gods, and she, the unbeliever." Charlie/Miles/Bass</p><p> </p><p>  <i>She walked between them, she was the glue that kept them sane, she was their hunger personified and they clung to her like the damned cling to an untouchable god. She stopped asking for permission, stopped asking for forgiveness, in her eyes they felt purified, forgiven, atoned. She lead them into a hell they had long ago forsaken and never apologized.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	give me your heart, call it a pretty story, and I'll wash the blood from your hands

_and the history books forgot about us  
and the Bible never mentioned us_

Sometimes Aaron would talk wistfully about showers around the campfire late at night, when they can afford to have a fire, when the smoke rising up into the night sky won’t get them killed or captured or worse, when warmth wins out in the _list of things that will keep us alive tonight_. He talks about warm running water like it was manna from heaven, how you could stand there for hours and never get cold. Charlie couldn’t remember this anymore than she could remember anything else from before the Blackout. But as she stepped into the cool, steady water flowing through the first river they’d encountered in weeks, she wondered (not for the first time) if that world had really been so much better than this. The stars hung low in the sky, reflecting off of the dark water, the beat of the current soothing her worn muscles. If she let go of the bottom of the river and floated, she would be hours away in a moment, wake up on the sandy shore of some other place, some other life. She could be any other person, just lift her feet and… 

She swam to the shore, picked up the square of soap that she had squirreled away during their last run through a general store, and began lathering her skin. The night air tugged at her hair, cooling her skin, and she just smiled, thinking of Aaron’s showers, of warm water falling from the ceiling, and scented soaps. 

When she returned to the campsite, Miles was waiting for her, sitting next to the fire, staring moodily at the flames. She sat down next to him, bumped his shoulder with hers, and looked over at where Nora and Aaron lay sleeping. They were exhausted, they were all exhausted, they were all unprepared for whatever was going to come next and yet, they kept walking, kept eating shit food, kept sleeping on the ground. 

For her. For Danny. For something indefinable that felt like justice and tasted like vengeance. 

“Thanks for sticking around,” she finally whispered, laying her hand on her uncle’s knee. He didn’t jerk away from her touch anymore, but he still stiffened, held himself very still. Danny had brought home a kitten once, and when anyone but Danny would touch it, the little thing would hold itself completely still, as if unsure whether the hand that stroke it would suddenly crush it. Under Danny’s fingers, it purred and twined itself around, head cocking to one side, eyes closed. With Danny it came alive. Miles reminded Charlie of that cat, even after all this time not trusting her. She wondered if there was anyone, or anything, that Miles would dare let his defenses down for. 

She’ll remember later that Danny said that once he sat down to pet the cat, but took it by surprise, and it immediately turned and attacked him, scratching him down the arm and biting his fingers. He thought it sat still when other people pet it to remind itself not to lash out, not to harm something that was only trying to give it affection.

This was more true than Charlie would know. 

But of course she’d remember this too late. 

(Her heart was sold within seconds anyway. Her father raised her to love broken things. Maybe he was preparing her for his brother. Maybe he was preparing her for her mother.  
Maybe he was preparing himself. 

Maybe she was the broken thing after all.)

 

_Through the scant historical records that were kept by the first Generation after the Blackout, there are mixed reports of a group of god-like figures that destroyed the old world and saved the new one. So pervasive were these original oral myths, that written accounts begin cropping up as early as the second century PB. There is some evidence suggesting that these figures, now known in modern mythological terms as the triumvirate: The Savior, The Destroyer, The Trickster, were possibly real people at one time, but the early generations were so determined that the old civilization would rise again, that proper records were not kept._

_- **Post-Blackout: The Old Ways and Their Gods** , Dr. Elizabeth Walden, 1592 PB_

 

The first time she pulled a boy inside of her, made him cry out, covered his mouth with her lips, she is just a child. She thinks that this will be the making of her, that adulthood will be waiting for her at the end of the night, that the stars will shine brighter. She thinks that she will walk taller, feel purified, feel like everything the boy carries in his eyes will be imprinted on her skin, make her the saint she knows somehow that she is supposed to be. 

All it does is awaken a hunger in her. 

His eyes, open and wide, hungry and terrified, as she rode him, clung to him, wrapped her limbs around him, light up like stars in the night sky. She longs to possess that moment, to watch it over and over again, to eat it up the way he thinks he’s eating up her. Boys are so intoxicatingly beautiful, the way they carry their hearts on their sleeves, the way they puff up their chests and pretend they aren’t exposing all their weaknesses. She longs to eat them up, devour their hearts, wreck them with her lips and her fluttering eyes and leave nothing behind but wreckage. 

Maybe she wasn’t loved enough as a child. Maybe having a coward for a father and an absent mother bred a hunger in her that she couldn’t fight off or deny no matter how much she tried to be good, tried to love the right way, tried to feel satisfied at the end of every meal. 

And then, sometime between meeting Miles and looking into his eyes when he thinks she can’t see him, she recognizes the same hunger in him that drives and teases her senses. He’s like a mirror to the darkest parts of herself, the parts that can leave in the wee hours of the morning with no remorse, the parts that cry when she should laugh, the parts that long desperately for a resolution that cannot come. 

She wanders back to their room in a dank hotel in the middle of the night, drunk on her own importance, swaying with the heavy weight of her own hunger, and maybe that’s the moment when he saw it, too. When he recognized the same things seeping out of her pores that he tried to hide from her. He pretends to be asleep, and that’s the most important lie he’s probably ever tried to tell her and failed. 

She runs her own fingers over her warm skin and pants into the dark night and stops wondering if there is absolution for this hunger she cannot contain. In the corner of the room, he pretends not to hear, not to know, not to gasp at each inhalation. 

It isn’t their first lie and it won’t be their last, but maybe it’s the most important secret they keep. 

 

_In the chaos following what they called the “Blackout” many people in the North American continent clung desperately to the old ways, their old gods. Ancient books were used well into the fifth century, however by 950 PB sects of the old religions had all but dwindled into extinction. Though by this time, trade between the continents had reached a pinnacle point, the one import that the nations in North America resisted was religious influence. The Triumvirate, evolving out of oral traditions dating back to the first generation after the Blackout, grew to popularity by borrowing elements of the existing traditions of the time._

_\- from the introduction to **The Trickster Inside** , Emelia Lystrom, 1379 PB_

 

After the Tower, after watching Nora’s life slip away in her arms, after the world sunk deeper into chaos, she ran away. She had never run away from anything before in her life, but Miles - with his stiff demeanor - and her mother - with desperation and disbelief clawing at her skin - and Aaron - heartbroken and beaten - they tore at her, they clung to her, their eyes followed her around the town they pretended to call home (is hell a home?) (can you carry hell in your chest and call it a place?) and she ran away. 

She wasn’t very clever about it, stomped around the house as she collected her gear, made a big show of saying goodbye without remorse. Maybe she was hoping they’d give her a reason to stay. 

They didn’t. 

She should have known. 

Miles followed her out beyond the town gate, she expected a lecture, a piece of advice. He handed her a box of condoms, ‘Don’t get knocked up, kid.”

She took it silently. Reached up and hugged him tightly, pressed her body against his. “I won’t,” she promised. Wouldn’t what? Wouldn’t let go? Wouldn’t forget? Wouldn’t come back in nine months with another Matheson on her arm? “The world can’t handle another Matheson.”

He kissed her softly on the cheek, as if he meant to, as if she weren’t silently begging at him to do anything but that, to come with him, to drag her behind a tree and show her how to truly be possessed by a Matheson, as if she wasn’t pressed against him, dying to break him apart and eat him slowly piece by piece. 

He kissed her softly on the cheek, as if he didn’t know how desperately hungry she was. As if her hunger didn’t match her own. As if there was anyone in the world that understood her more than he did. As if there was anything at the end of that road that wouldn’t lead her back to him.

She walked away, she walked and walked and walked and thirsted for everything she couldn’t have, for everything she left behind. She kissed boys and left marks on their backs and thighs with her fingernails and her sharp teeth. She kissed girls and left bruises on their hips and breasts with her tongue and fingers. She walked and walked and walked and thirsted and nothing ever took the place of the one thing that was more like her than her own reflection in the mirror, and nothing ever satisfied her the way his lips pressed against the smooth skin of her cheek nearly made the rest of the world fall away. 

 

 

_“I never wanted this life, to be this person,” he exclaimed, shaking his fist at the sky._  
“It doesn’t matter, brother. It never mattered,” his companion replied, eyes hooded and dark, a shadow more than a man.  
“It’s time, anyway,” she whispered up at the Tower, reaching up into the stars, “to burn it all down.”  
That’s what they journeyed here to do, what they’ve been avoiding for all this time, to save the world by ending it. 

_\- “My Brother’s Keeper” by anonymous, originally published in **The Journal of Speculative Fiction** , 1756 PB_

 

When the dust settled, when she brought Bass back to Miles like a cat with a headless mouse as an offering to the people of the house, it started to feel like something had finally been worth fighting for, of course the fighting only began again. And so the world turns, with a crossbow in her hand and their swords at her back.

It began slowly, or maybe she only saw it slowly, in spits and starts, in rare moments around the fire, in the midst of battle, while walking walking walking from one disaster to another, but one day she looked up and Miles had softened. He wasn’t standing perfectly still, he wasn’t holding his body in a perfect mock-looseness that only betrayed how stiff his posture actually was, he was relaxed, his shoulders rolling as he walked. 

She looked up and her breath caught. So that’s what it looks like to be satisfied, so that is what it looks like to no longer feel hungry hungry hungry, so that’s what it takes, that is the mirror of her own satisfaction. 

Bass watched her, his eyes open and wide, seeing and knowing though she hadn’t moved or spoken. His eyes shouted, _silly girl, you haven’t been hungry_ he smiled and his smile screamed, _silly girl, can you see it now? can you see what true hunger is?_

Miles turned to her and in that moment, it was gone, his loose-limbed comfort, his ease, disappeared as quickly as it had become. Under her gaze, he was once again a mirror, once again the still, silent statue, pretending to be comforted when he was desperately, achingly hungry. 

She had been such a fool.

She tried to be jealous, tried to be angry. She dragged up all the bitterness in her heart and rolled it around on her tongue, but it dissolved there like a piece of cotton candy, like a memory from the old world, like a girl she was trying to be but could never stand against the wind without blowing apart. 

She clung to her hunger in the night, her hands filling all the spaces their eyes woke in her during the day, stroking at a fire that she couldn’t extinguish and didn’t dare try to. She felt like a pile of kindling, in the moments just before a spark flies from a nearby fire to land and create a catastrophe. She felt like a storm in the earliest moments, when the electricity in the sky sparks and causes wolves to howl. She felt like a lone wolf howling at the moon, longing for a freedom that couldn’t be attained. 

She had been such a fool. 

 

 

_If there was an underlying source to the moment of our upheaval, it is clear that these three figures knew what it was and how to stop it. In the early formation of the worship of these three divine figures, each sect held on to the belief that _their_ diety was the one who fought for the light, fought to turn everything back to the way it was before. Sometime in the Post-Renaissance period of the 9th century PB, a reformation of sorts occurred and the three branches combined under the new belief that the Triumvirate (as it was from then on known) saved the world by destroying it, that it was they - these divine figures - that destroyed the old world in an attempt to save the souls remaining. The bloodshed that shaped the first few generations after the Blackout had long since been forgotten by the general population, and the old world with its glittering lights and magical technology was a mythology instead of a memory. _

_- **A History of the Reformation: Our Gods, Our Tragedies** , Dr. Anthony Baron, 1999 PB_

 

When they were all together, all four of them under one roof, and she could finally see the way they all talked to each other, moved around each other, it felt more like a dance than a war. The three of them with history and silences and her, with her hunger and her wolve’s teeth hiding under their need for her to be pure and kind. They danced and she sat in the corner and tried not to expose them all. 

Aaron grinned, watching Connor and Jason circle around the camp like cats in heat and said, “All’s fair in love and war, right?” with a wink. She winked back because she’d never been in love and can’t yet understand the truth to his words. 

She fucks Connor because it feels good, because she’s hungry.  
She lets Jason love her because it feels good, because she’s hungry. 

She sits between Miles and Bass and listens to them banter, to them shout, to them smile at each other without ever forming the shape with their lips and she can no longer tell what she is hungry for. For these men, these silly ridiculous men, that can’t decide whether it is easier to love or to fight. For the boys she strings after her like cats chasing a feather upon the ground. 

When they were all together, all four of them under one roof, it felt like family, only stranger. It felt like being hungry in a crowd instead of all alone, like they were the only ones who could understand how much she needed. Like she could scream out her need and they’d only nod their heads and wait patiently for her to find her own solution. 

“Sorry for wanting so much,” she said to the trees in the forest. They were the only things she could expose herself to. 

They were the only things left that didn’t threaten to take something back from her, to demand that she give back as much as she took, to beg for forgiveness for the thing that she asked for. 

She fucks Connor because it feels good, because she’s hungry. He asks her for her heart and she feels like she’s drowning.  
She lets Jason love her because it feels good, because she’s hungry. He asks her for her hunger and she feels like she’s suffocating. 

She watches them lose their minds, lose their hearts, lose their breath, lose their need for her, and she feels more weighted down than before, feels more desperate, feels the ghosts of their hands tugging at her every moment, begging her for all the things she couldn’t give them. 

She was never a very nice girl. 

 

_What had once been a cultural truth, owned and maintained through oral storytelling, speculative fiction and articles published in small printing presses, and passed down through generations, now became integrated into a founding of an official Church and Doctrine. The ancient books, those religious texts from the Old World, were burned and destroyed. The Triumvirate began as a rag-tag collection of anti-heroes, a story to tell children at night in order to explain this strange new world, became endowed with divinity and immortality. Children of the Post-Reformation generations were now told stories of the Savior watching over their beds at night, the Trickster walked through the woods on nimble feet with a sword in each hand, and the Destroyer brought the rain and started fires. In a matter of one generation, a willingness to believe in purpose and meaning, a desire to forget the stories of their grandparent’s parent’s world, the Triumvirate stopped fighting the status quo and started maintaining it._

_\- “The Triumvirate: Appropriation of Cultural Heroes” by Patricia Levine, originally published in **Journal of North American Literature** , 1956 PB_

 

There was a war to fight (there’s always a war to fight) (if there isn’t, they’ll start one, that’s the first thing she learns about them) and so they left. The Patriots crumbled under their swinging swords, they bathed in blood every night and it was either glorious or divine or a great cosmic tragedy. 

She sent them hunting with a gleam in her eyes that they pretended to laugh about but curdled something buried deep inside them that they couldn’t determine. They were too old, gone hungry for too long, forgot that the same hunger was reflected in her eyes. They arrived back to the camp to find her sprawled naked on a rock, a dessert in a wasteland of desperation and hunger, a well sprung forth to quench a thirst they had refused to name. 

“I’m not taking no for an answer,” as if she had ever asked them for anything before this moment. As if she had done anything before this moment but follow their lead, watch them and wait, sit back and wonder when when when.

She screamed the first time Bass thrust himself inside of her, leaning against that rock like an offering, like penance. She closed her eyes and screamed to the universe, to the trees, for the sheer pleasure of feeling her voice full in her chest come pouring out of her for the first time, the fullness of her spilling out into the air like a prayer. Bass laughed, it rumbled in his chest and curled her toes, and kissed her softly on the mouth. Over his shoulder, Miles leaned against a tree and drew a deep breath, as if he had been drowning and the sound of her voice brought him back to life. 

She slept curled between them, their breath hot on her skin, their fingers leaving marks deep into her bones for every inch of skin they touched. 

They fought a war and for the first time, lived in peace. 

She walked between them, she was the glue that kept them sane, she was their hunger personified and they clung to her like the damned cling to an untouchable god. She stopped asking for permission, stopped asking for forgiveness, in her eyes they felt purified, forgiven, atoned. She lead them into a hell they had long ago forsaken and never apologized.

They wrapped their limbs around her and let her carry their burdens, they gave her their sins and she ate them with relish, a smile on her lips. They gave her their stiffness and their pride, she kissed their tears away. They basked in each other and she watched with so much gladness, as if their bodies could give her nourishment, as if their hearts - screaming out - fed her very soul. As if she had a soul left to barter with. As if they had anything to offer her at all. 

 

_Today Archeologists discovered a journal in an underground bunker that may reveal the origins of the historical Triumvirate. Already, there are reports of strict religious groups attempting to discredit the find. The question we all now must ask ourselves: are we ready for our gods to be made mortal once again?_

_\- “History Comes to Life”, **New Vegas Times** , 2010 PB _

 

They only made her more hungry, more feral, more desperate for more. 

She had been forsaken in the desert, parched and bleeding with want for years, and now she thirsted and thirsted and thirsted always for more. 

_Silly girl, can you see it now? Can you see what true hunger is?_

She cried in their arms as they came with her, filled herself up to the brim with their lips and their skin and their laughter. She laughed in their arms as they pet and cradled her, giving her everything they hadn’t already ripped from each other, and always wanting more. 

In a little town on their way from one big city to the next, hearts stained with blood and bodies hungry for more than each other’s lips, Bass took her hand in his and walked her down the street. He twined his fingers through hers and smiled when men and women glanced their way. He admired her body pressed against his in shop windows, made grand gestures and bought her ridiculous things. She thought maybe she was seeing a little bit of what the new world had taken away from him, a puppy eager to please, eager to love, eager to cherish and worship. 

She drew him into a storage closet, unzipped his jeans and angled her hips towards his, her hand stroking the length of him as his eyes closed with want and need and _her_. She took his lip in her teeth and bit too hard, he fucked her quickly, eyes open and boring into her all the while. She came with his eyes on hers, with his lips on hers, with his fingers digging into her hips. 

“You aren’t giving me nearly as much as you’re taking,” he whispered in her ear as they strolled back down the street in the twilight. Miles waved to them from the entrance to a hotel at the end of the road. 

She shrugged.

“Fucking Mathesons,” he muttered under his breath. 

_Silly girl, can you see it now? Can you see what true hunger is?_

He fucked her in the back of a storage closet in a little town, his eyes boring into hers as her body shuddered against his. They whispered to her of hunger and need, of redemption and trust, of failure and success. They whispered to her that she was still a child playing a game with giants. They whispered, his eyes, that she wasn’t taking all she wanted, that she was still clinging to the scraps she’d allow herself. 

They held her between them, they stroked her muscles and kissed her skin and they poured out everything she needed to keep breathing. 

But she didn’t take everything she needed. 

She didn’t give in to everything she wanted. 

She didn’t admit to all she thirsted for. 

 

 

_We believe in the Triumvirate, in the divinity of the heroes of the rise of the New World. We believe in the sanctity of their sacrifice and in the purity of the world which they created for us. We believe in the immortality of the Savior, for she is our eternal mother. She birthed this world for us with flame and smoke. She gave us this world for us to protect by destroying the world of our father’s fathers. We believe in the purity of the Destroyer, for he is our eternal father. He shaped the new world with his sword and gun. He destroyed the evil left in the time of transition, providing us with a clean renewal. We believe in the power of the Trickster, for he is our eternal brother. He teaches us the importance of transience, of forgiveness, of redemption. In the hands of the Savior and in the hands of the Destroyer, our brother was shaped and re-shaped again. Just as the world was shaped in their hands. Just as we are shaped by their hands. In the Trickster we find our true image, a brother to guide us, an example to remember. For as the world changed, so did the Trickster, so shall we._

_- **Keeping the Trickster in Your Heart** , First Lord of the Triumvirate: Connor Jeremiah, 925 PB_

 

 

“Why are you trusting him?” she was young, she was angry, she was mourning. 

“Because I don’t have a choice, Charlie,” Miles didn’t move, didn’t put up much of a fight. 

“There’s always a choice,” she hissed, standing up and walking away from him. “You just don’t want to figure out what to do without him.”

“And you don’t want to figure out what happens when you stop hating him,” he muttered, taking another drink. 

She left him behind, walked until she could scream at the top of her lungs without anyone around to hear. Danny was dead, Danny was dead, Danny was dead. It had been long enough now to remember, but she still had to remind herself. Still had the instinct to turn to him in the evenings and tell him something, to hear his voice in the moments before she woke up. Danny was dead and it was Monroe’s fault. 

She carried her hatred in her heart because it was necessary, because it kept her waking up every morning, because there wasn’t much left to fight for. Because when she was angry, she didn’t feel as hungry. Because when she reminded herself of her own hatred, she could stem the thirst that overtook her at all other moments. 

Because hatred kept her heart beating in her chest and her feet keeping time with her legs as they propelled her across the earth. 

Because it was the only thing keeping her warm at night.

 

_Mom said that the world would never know what we did, in the Tower, with the nano. She’s wrong. A girl on the street today handed me a flower and told me that flowers are made by the Savior. I thought at first that she meant Jesus, or something like that. She didn’t. She meant Rachel. Stories travel fast, even stories that we don’t think anyone could know. At least no one knows their names. Even Miles and Bass - as infamous as they are - haven’t been connected to the truth… or the new truth that’s making it’s way around now. And no one knows me, my part, the fact that I was there, firing my gun alongside them. My family, always famous. I’m glad I’m still invisible, still unknown. I still don’t know if we did the right thing, even now. It felt like the right thing at the time, right? It felt like we were doing what we had to do. Maybe we weren’t. Guess it doesn’t matter anymore._

_- **diary excerpt, dated June 7, 2050 AD, author unknown**_

 

After Rachel, after the nano, there was no going back to what had been there before. There was no going back to the things they had been fighting for all this time. It was like something clicked throughout the whole world, and all that was left was the feeling that it hadn’t been worth it to begin with. Her words changed everything, they always did, her death changed everything else, and that was the end or the beginning or something in between. 

Bass lasted two weeks, curled around Charlie’s back, clinging to her like it was his own mother that died, like he had loved Connor the way a father is supposed to, like he could absorb some of the steel in her spine and dissolve it into his veins. After that, he was gone. No note, no reason, no apology. 

She couldn’t blame him. 

“He’s gone,” she said. Miles didn’t answer. His eyes grew more haunted, his body stiffened in the old way, he started playing at monster instead of being one and she tried not to be resentful for that. 

Miles walked around with bloodshot eyes and refused to look at Charlie, or touch her, or do anything other than drink himself to death. As if they hadn’t been sinners all this time anyway, as if some god or angel was going to spring from the earth and declare them demons. As if they hadn’t known that about themselves all this time. 

She dragged them back home, to where it all started, to the town that knew them as Mathesons. She played dutiful daughter during the day and crawled between the sheets with him at night, wrapping her arms around him and asking for nothing but his warmth during the cold nights. 

She read him stories from her grandfather’s old books, partial to the ones that felt the most true, stories of demons and gods and heroes battling for love and lust and pride, for that was all there was. She read him stories of heroic deeds and epic warriors and journeys across land and sea. She sat on his lap like a child, clung to him, buried his face in his chest, and filled the air with the sound of her voice so that they didn’t have time or space to remember what was lost. 

Everything was lost.  
Everything was the same.

It’s not like she was ever willing to admit what she needed from them to begin with. She was a broken thing trained by a coward to love broken things as if she were whole. As if being hungry was the same thing as needing, as if needing was the same thing as loving. She was a broken thing trained to love broken things as if doing so would make them all whole again, but she forgot her training all the same; she gave and she took and she pretended fragments made up a finished piece.

It’s not like she could even blame him for leaving them alone, two Mathesons, too afraid to tell the truth, to take what they want, to lay their hearts on their sleeves and let the chips fall where they may. 

A girl may love a villain, love his dark heart and his blackened soul, but that doesn’t make her a villain. A man may love a broken thing, love its scars and all its cracks, and he too will end up broken.

What is more tragic, the girl who loves a dark heart, or the man who loves a broken thing again and again and again?

 

 

_After the turn of the century, a diary was found seemingly implicating a fourth figure that lived on after the mythical Triumvirate and kept a record of her life. This diary was deemed the “Apocrypha of Mary” - the diary itself was never published or widely known, disappearing into the hands of a librarian that seemed to have ran off into the night. What scant details remained were relegated to word of mouth tales from the first group of scientists who discovered the journal. The Cult of Mary rose in popularity a few decades later, images of a young woman with long, wavy hair and bright blue eyes circulated for a while and then also disappeared. Long after the Triumvirate lost its religious and mythological standhold in North America, the Cult of Mary remained, eventually blending into the Religion of Maria popular in South America and much of Europe since the Blackout._

_- **Mary, Maria, Mariana: The Many Faces of God** , Dr. Inara Jeseph, 2580 PB_

 

She left him a note on the kitchen counter. 

_Have to find him. Love you always, Charlie_

She didn’t write, I need more. She didn’t write, I’m so hungry, so desperately hungry. She didn’t write, I’m more thirsty now than ever before. She didn’t write, my heart is a Matheson heart and we’ve always known that but I can’t drown just to save you from your own remorse. She didn’t write, I’d baptize you in the salt of my own tears if I had any left to shed. 

She didn’t write, fuck redemption, fuck this small town, fuck waiting around and pretending my palms will ever be clean of the blood that we’ve spilt. She didn’t write, I’ve gone too far down this road to hell and I’m gonna dance upon the broken wings of the angels when they try to rip me away from you. She didn’t write, I’ve made my peace with the wolf that paces inside of my chest but I can’t give it all to you, you will drink me dry, you will leave me empty without trying. 

She didn’t write, Sorry about the way this meant everything and could never mean something, sorry for taking your peace and making it my own, sorry for running after the thing you love - I promise you I’ll gobble it all up, I promise you they’ll be nothing left of him when I’m done. Sorry about giving you all I had and leaving to get something of my own. Sorry for taking what you had. Sorry for leaving you alone. 

She didn’t write, fuck you Miles Matheson. 

She didn’t write, fuck this Matheson life, fuck being a broken thing, fuck letting everything die as we lie and lie and lie. Fuck being hungry and wanting to be fed, I’m ready to be loved. Fuck being thirsty and wanting to be sustained, I’m ready to throw myself into the ocean and be drowned rather than live on these scraps we’ve told ourselves are ours to bear. Fuck doing what we think is right when everything we want is wrong.

She didn’t write, love something. She didn’t write, we could have loved you, if you’d let us. She didn’t write, I’ve always loved you, if only I knew how. She didn’t write, love something even if it isn’t us, let your heart beat with something more sustainable than need, let yourself _want_. She didn’t write, let yourself love. 

She didn’t write, sorry about this note in the kitchen, the blame isn’t all mine, look in the mirror sometime and find me in your eyes, the way I’ll always find you. She didn’t write, not sorry at all about this note in the kitchen, I’m running towards something instead of away from something for the first time in my life and I’m happy. 

She didn’t write, forget about me, forget about us, start over. 

She didn’t write, we’ll never forget you. 

She didn’t write, I’m sorry for being broken, I’m sorry for breaking you, I’m sorry for all the ways you were broken before I even knew you. I’m sorry we couldn’t heal you, I hope someone else can. 

She didn’t write, I’m running to the one thing you never should have walked away from. 

She didn’t write, I’m walking away. 

 

 

_Scholarship over the mysterious “Mary” rose in prominence around 2400-2500 PB, just after the religious war between the Triumvirates and the Marias, as they were then called. Many at the time focused primarily on the figure of Mary, her dealings with the Gods, her implied immortality given for her heroic deeds, the sanctity of her presumed innocence. The truth is, all knowledge surrounding the mysterious “Mary” figure and her diary have long since been lost. What we can know is what effect the figure of the Mary had on the general imagination and why her existence was so important, arguments over its validity spawned the first World War of the New World. Mary’s appearance, her entrance, into the Triumvirate implied that there was more than one way to salvation, that a mere girl could rub elbows with the Gods and - as many speculated - be the only one to survive, to stay on and experience the world that they created together. Every girl could be Mary, every young woman held within her the power to be majestic, to be heroic, to survive even the wrath of the Gods. It was this survival instinct, this ability to watch the world burn and still put pen to paper decades later, that captured the imagination. It suggested that we didn’t need the Gods anymore, that we could live without them, for **she did**. _

_- **Finding Mary: The Inner Holiness that Destroyed the World** , Dr. Asha Rein, 2872 PB_

 

She found him in the midst of a long-con south of the Mexico border, near a beach, and with a rum in his hand. She played the part he wanted and it thrilled her to take on another name, another face, another smile and watch his eyes glow with remembrance, with desire, with hunger. 

In all those months and years of scratching at his skin and licking up the blood, she forgot how much he wanted it, how much he hungered to feed her. 

And so she let him feed her. 

She held out her hand and on her palm, drenched in the blood they had shed together, drenched in the tears they had poured out over the earth, drenched in all the sins he had laid at her feet in the past, was her heart. His eyes leaped up and they screamed, _precious girl, can you feel it now? Can you feel what true hunger is?_

She found him on a beach with rum in his hand, she walked up to him without pause, slid one leg over him and pressed herself into his chest, and handed herself over. Like a prize at a carnival, she placed himself in his hands and took pleasure in exposure. She hid in his game, she exposed herself to his eyes only. She seduced everyone who saw her and handed them to him on a silver platter. 

They ran, hand in hand, because there was no reason not to, because there were a million diamonds in a bag screaming at them to hide, to hide, to hide. And so they hid. In boats and on islands, in little shacks on beaches, they hid in plain sight. 

“We could have gotten a bigger score if you had waited,” he mocked her, eyebrows raised over his glass. 

She shrugged, took off his shirt one button at a time, and threw herself into the ocean under a night sky, floating on the reflection of stars, but never washing away. He pinned her down with his arms and his legs and his eyes and she felt like she was floating. 

She let him feed her. 

She floated on the excess of his heart and they called it love. She swam in the liquid gold of his eyes and she called it freedom and he called her salvation and they laughed at the reflections of monsters drenched in blood that greeted them in the mirror each morning. 

She let him feed her and slowly she offered him pieces of herself to devour in turn. She said, “We’ll stop knowing where I begin and you end,” and he just smiled and pointed to the stars shining low in the sky, so close she felt they could reach out and touch them, bring them home, give them as gifts to each other.

_Leave me to your clouds_  
to your towers in the sky  
Leave me to your fire  
and your gardens of pleasure 

_Leave me to this world_  
this world of your hands  
Leave me this body  
that you have scorched and  
burned and  
melted into nothing 

_Leave me_  
as the Gods left Mary  
Leave me  
Leave me  
along the path that you claim  
on the world that you burn  
Leave me  
as the Gods left Mary  
alone in the wreckage they created 

_just as You_  
have carried me like a dragon from my  
Tower  
into a desert wasteland  
Leave Me 

_- **My Lover is a Dragon** , anonymous, 2553 PB_

There is a point between heaven and hell, where the water in the river that divides the world runs warm and slow, where the souls that had fought for freedom pretend they are not a part of an afterlife that divides them down the middle. There is a point between heaven and hell, where monsters with pure hearts and damaged souls float upon the river and never move with the current.

Charlie thought, as she searched, that they would find a war, that they would find a battle, that they would lose themselves into another cause, into another kingdom. She saw herself with a crown upon her head and a scepter in his hand. She saw their future in silver and gold. She tells him this, lying naked on the beach in his arms, and he laughs. 

They lose themselves in the daily battle of staying afloat; they throw things, they stomp and storm, they yell until their voices are hoarse, they fuck until they can’t walk and then fuck some more. They float upon the clear water of the ocean and lay in sandy beaches as if they deserve this, as if they are finally free of the hell they created and are living in the heaven of someone else’s creation. 

“Don’t you miss it?”

“The fighting? The blood? The death?” she’s surprised. “No. Do you?”

They still fight, they still bleed, death still haunts them at every turn. There is no turning back the clock, there is no redemption, there is only this waiting game, with their hearts in their hands and their love lingering on their lips like a promise or a virtue. 

“Do you think we’ll be forgiven?” she asks. 

“You maybe, me probably not,” they never discuss death or religion. They discuss the tide and the sun and the sand. 

“Then let’s burn their heaven to the ground.”

He picks up her hand and kisses her palm, her bloody, scarred palm. His eyes say, _You have already_ , his eyes scream, _I’d rather be a fool for you in hell than alone in a heaven without you._ He says, “For you, love, I’d burn a thousand heavens and sent them all to hell.”

She presses herself against him, kisses him slowly and softly, her heart thumping in her chest, half owned by him and half devoured by their past. He kisses her back, his hand sliding up her bare back, his heart thumping in his chest, half owned by her and half devoured by his past. 

Together, maybe they make up one whole person. 

Or maybe, together, they are just fragments on the ground, their hearts not worth much, doomed to be forgotten by time. The greatest love story never told. 

Or some bullshit like that.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to do this to this prompt since I first saw it months before the Armada opened claims. All of the historical documents are of course my own fabrication. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it. It's a work long in progress and probably a bit shorter than I'd ~like, but deadlines being what they are - I'm mostly just pleased that I finally got this idea in black and white for your eyes. xoxo
> 
> (for the record, here is the first 'draft' of this idea::   
> no kelsey. no you don’t want to write an alternative history of the republic feat. historian’s perspectives of charlie. no. no you don’t.   
>  #charlie matheson #is just like #my boo? #i just really like her #and i want all the fic about her #she is byron in the wild west #the monster in me wants to eat the boy in you #BUT IT WOULD BE SO AWESOME? #LIKE? #FIFTY YEARS LATER SHE IS A CRAZY OLD LADY IN THE WILDS #AND SHE LAUGHS OVER SPECULATIONS AND SILLY STORIES THE LOCAL KIDS TELL #100 years later she is an enigma wrapped in a riddle #everyone claims to be descended from one of her affairs #150 years later she is two people #by 200 years maybe she and rachel are confused #no one really can tell which one is which anymore. the stories just get muddled. #some wacky historian around 250 years proclaims that charlie was connor all along #just posed as a dude because why the fuck not #they get in a fist fight with the other historian #who is writing their thesis on charloe's affair #SHE CAN'T BE THE MISTRESS AND THE SON #they get drunk later and become besties #MAYBE SHE WAS THO #MAYBE THAT WAS HER COVER #idek #i just want history to remember her #fondly #but maybe not well #or maybe too well)


End file.
